Returning to World of Warcraft to play Cataclysm. You haven't played WoW in years -- but then you got a whiff of the expansion.

Now you're itching to play again, but you're completely lost. So much has changed. Heck, so much is still changing. What do you need to do to get your characters back up to speed? Is there something you should be doing right now, before the expansion hits in December? WoW Insider makes it simple. Coming back to WoW after a break This article hits all the basics: Should you start now or wait for the expansion? What's important about Cataclysm? Cataclysm: The inside scoop Here's our reference page where we constantly update you with everything you need to know about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Click onward for more answers you can sink your teeth into.
Corrupted Blood incident. The Corrupted Blood debuff being spread amongst characters in Ironforge, one of World of Warcraft′s in-game cities.

The spell, intended to last only seconds and function only within the new area of Zul'Gurub, soon spread across the virtual world by way of a bug that allowed pets and minions to take the affliction out of its intended confines. By both accidental and purposeful intent, a pandemic ensued that quickly killed lower-level characters and annoyed higher-leveled ones, drastically changing normal gameplay, as players did what they could to avoid infection.

Despite measures such as programmer-imposed quarantines, and the players' abandoning of densely populated cities (or even just not playing the game), the epidemic was finally controlled with a combination of patches and resets of the virtual world. The conditions and reactions of the event attracted the attention of epidemiologists for its implications of how human populations could react to a real-world epidemic.
Controller prototype stretches thumbs for extra feedback — www.joystiq.com. By Richard Mitchell on Mar 6th 2012 11:00PM Video game feedback systems haven't changed dramatically since the implementation of "rumble" over a decade ago.

But between Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour, there's a bona fide battle of the bands going on as the holidays approach. Both games promise arena-filling rock-god dreams, and both are good--so let's take a look at what makes each game tick.

Portal

Doh. To be honest, some of us barely have enough time to build a pyramid or towering 8-bit video game character in Minecraft much less a gigantic, functional machine that can be used here in the real world. Yet it's amazing to see these massive projects show up in video demonstrations where players build virtual machines brick by brick, especially from those who can't even legally vote. Case in point: 16-year-old "MaxSGB" has created a working scientific/graphic calculator inside Minecraft. On a virtual scale, the functional device is enormous -- enough so that anyone in the real world would become a red blot of meat and bone staining the road if they fell from the very top.

"The screen and keypad were always meant to be the main feature of this machine," he writes on YouTube. The video itself explains that its overall size is more than 5 million cubic meters -- just over 250 x 250 x 100 blocks.